MT Hephaestus
bunkering oil tanker which ran aground off Qawra, Malta
MT or MV Hephaestus was a bunkering oil tanker that ran aground off Qawra, Malta on 10 February 2018 and was subsequently scuttled as a dive site off Xatt l-Aħmar, Gozo on 29 August 2022.
Description
MV Hephaestus was a steel-built tanker with a tonnage of 595 GRT. It was 61.33 m (201.2 ft) long, with a beam of 7.93 m (26.0 ft). It had one 6 cylinder Ruston Stafford 6 CSRKM 4 Stroke diesel engine with a single shaft and one screw. The vessel's power was 410 kW (550 hp) and it had a speed of 11 kn (20 km/h; 13 mph).
Career
The vessel was built in 1965 by Bröderna Jonssons Torrdocka (Kållansdsö Varv AB) in Lidköping, Sweden. By 2018, it was owned by the Orbiter Navigation Corp. and managed by Volont Maritime S.A. It was registered in Lomé, Togo.
2018 grounding
At the time of the 2018 grounding, the Hephaestus was commanded by Bangladeshi captain Joynal Abedin. The other crew members were from Bangladesh, Russia and Egypt. The vessel had been at sea for about four months, and from January 2018 it had been anchored at Is-Sikka l-Bajda off Qawra, Malta while there was a dispute relating to payment of crew's wages.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q113677699. Authority coordinates are 36.017, 14.289. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2022 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “MT Hephaestus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.